Signs

With “Signs,” M. Night Shyamalan, the man behind the excellent “The Sixth Sense,” and the deplorable “Unbreakable,” follows what for him is becoming a worrisome pattern. Namely, he selects an obsession, creates a cloud of mystery around it, and shoots a stylish, gloomy picture in which the punchline is supposed to justify all that came before. Here his obsession is crop circles (you know, those intricate patterns carved into grain fields which the credulous like to believe are signs of alien activity here on earth). Right away we seem to have a problem. I mean, aren’t crop circles so twenty years ago? Does anyone even care about them any more? Does anyone still think they are made by aliens, and if so, does it matter? This is all fertile grazing for the Nostradamus crowd, but what about those of us who live in the year 2002? Shyamalan, who wrote, produced, and directed this movie (and, as he has a habit of doing, gave himself a chunky cameo role) is beginning to get on my nerves a little bit. He is obviously talented, but from where I stand he is mistaking self indulgence for inspiration. He treats any notion that captures his fancy, no matter how transiently, as a subject worthy of a fifty-million-dollar movie. Sorry, that’s not so.

It would be one thing if he came up with a new and clever take on what the whole crop circle business is about, but in the end, he palms off the same claptrap that has been bandied about for decades, and expects us to believe that it’s something new and interesting. Heck, even his aliens are 50’s-era pro forma —little (or in this case big) green men (and rather fake looking at that), who secrete vaporous fumes from their fingertips. We only get to see one such creature, though, and I can’t figure out whether that’s due to budget constraints or Shyamalan’s conviction that when it comes to creatures, less is more. Mel Gibson stars as Graham Hess, a farmer who used to be a minister until his wife’s tragic death caused him to lose his faith. Now, I like Gibson, and I think he’s a good actor, and an even better movie star, but he sure isn’t anyone’s idea of a man of faith. Nevertheless, he runs through his lugubrious lines dutifully, underdirected—as are all the actors—by our fearless leader. You get the feeling sometimes that Shyamalan is afraid that if he lets any of his characters show any strong emotion that he will have nowhere left to take his narrative, and he may be right.

Graham lives on his farm with his two precocious (not to say spooky) kids and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), and, as it happens, his farm is chosen as the recipient of some of the aforementioned crop circles. In one of the weirder choices the film makes, we watch a lot of the alien invasion on TV, along with the rest of the Hess clan. And the climactic sequence of the movie is a long, drawn-out siege of the family as they cower in their cellar, stacking furniture against the door to keep the aliens out. This is all so retro that I almost couldn’t believe it, but it is nothing compared to the “secret” of the aliens’ weakness, which is something straight out of Captain Kirk-era “Star Trek.” Is this, then, to be Shyamalan’s legacy, to recycle old conceits and try to make them shiny and new? I hope not. “Signs” is not terrible. It is handsomely mounted, and it does generate some reasonable suspense. But Shyamalan needs a sounding board for his ideas, to help him decide which ones really merit this kind of attention. The movie, oddly, put me in mind of John Irving’s wonderful novel “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” (Those who have read it will know why.) The difference is that a great writer like Irving makes all the material leading to his punchline worthwhile, while Shyamalan’s half-baked reveries about crop circles and green aliens don’t at all. (8/25/02)